How to export knowledge base content from your Help Center as PDF (no coding required)

"Hi Patrick, we really love your product, could you please send us a printable user manual so we can have an in-depth look at it? Thanks!"

I was shocked when one of our biggest new customers asked me that question. We just moved to a 21st century solution for all our customer support and knowledge sharing activities (yay Zendesk <3) but struggled to deliver on this request in time.

We really love our customers and don't want that to happen again, so we decided to build a Zendesk app that makes exporting knowledge base content as a PDF a breeze. We hope you can benefit from it too! :) (If you do, please let us know! <3)

If you already installed the app and want to configure the fields afterwards you can do that at Admin / Manage / Knowledge Base to PDF / Change settings

* The link above explains how to obtain an API token. Make sure to use your agent's e-mail, otherwise the token won't work

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After successfully installing the app you can access it by clicking on its icon in the left navigation bar:

2. Configure your PDF User Manual

Set a PDF front page title

This text will be shown on your first page, it should describe the document. e.g. [MyProductName] User Manual, etc

Optional: Select categories you want to export

Don't want to export your whole knowledge base? No problem!

This UI control enables you to filter the content that will be included in your PDF. Select any number of categories by clicking on their label, it will only include articles that are part of your selected categories.

3. Download it

A click on the "CREATE USER MANUAL" button will get you to the next step and the download will trigger automatically. Voila, that's it!

Note: This step can take from a few seconds to a minute depending on the size of your knowledge base.

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Other popular use cases

Product Knowledge Base Versioning

You just released a new version of your product that will require changes of your knowledge base articles, but you still have to support previous versions of your product.

No problem! Create a snapshot of your whole knowledge base as a PDF user manual before changing the articles for your new product and send it to customers requesting documentation about older versions

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Updates

2017-05-01: Added support for generating PDFs from private help center content

thanks for trying the app, I just had a look at our log files and it seems that your help center is set to restricted/private. The currently publicly available version of the app does not support exporting private content but we already submitted a new version that solves this issue and it should be live soon.

If you want to give it a try before it's through the Zendesk review queue, we'd be happy to send it over: support@kolibridigital.com

Hi Patrick, I just tried it but the output really looks more than weird. No properly page-breaks (at least after article or so), lot's of stuff and cryptical-links... all in all I don't believe I could hand this our to some of our customers, because of it's layout problems. If that could be improved, that would be great.... unless zendesk has some css-styles around, that I could you to tweak things a bit better....

thanks for trying the app. As you might have seen it is is still in an early stage and I'm collecting as much feedback as I can to make it better, so thank you for leaving a comment! :) Could you send me a few screenshots w/ examples of the problems you mentioned to patrick@kolibridigital.com ?

Right now the styles seem to work for *most* help centers, but it's not easy to generate good looking content for *all* help centers without knowing about the edge cases. So whenever you notice that your PDF doesn't look good please let me know so I can look into it and fix it

Fontsizes and line-height of headlines do not look optimized for PDF printing (to low line-heights)

Very different Font-Sizes even within one article (although the article viewed in the browser looks fine)

Links being shown as native Zendesk-URL's e.g. related articles. This should be better similar to the generated index

Related Search words are also shown as native URLs

No underlines under links, because this makes it harder to read

So, all in all mainly optical reasons.

What could be also great is to have a setting, if a user want's to generate a hard-page-break after each article, so that it's easier to see, where a article ends and where the next starts.

To be able to make at least a clean/neat browser-print (at least for one article) I simply added the some PRINT CSS-styles into our zendesk helpcenter layout. So all unneccessary stuff is not being printed/shown on PDF and looks already very good now.

Thanks for putting this together! We'd like to give access to some elements of our Support site to potential clients, but the site is private so that gets a little tricky. This app would do the job perfectly.

I'm having a little trouble getting the export to work--when I configure the settings for the app, there's no option to Include all Pages and the Categories/Sections field doesn't populate with anything from my site.

I've generated the API token and input our Zendesk support email correctly, so not sure what the issue is. Are you still supporting this app? Do you have any suggestions for troubleshooting this issue?

We have multiple brands set up for different regions, how can I configure this to pull the articles from each brand, it is currently only pulling articles from our default US brand help center need to pull articles from our other helpcenters

Since this integration was built and is supported by a third-party developer, I'm afraid we won't be able to help much here in the Community. However, it looks like Patrick included a contact email address so you can reach out to him to find out if he can make an update to the integration!

this is currently not supported. There was a trick where you could set your default help center & default language to whichever knowledge base you wanted to export but this recently stopped working. We're working on a new app version that will let you do that properly, I will post here as soon as we have something usable

I only have about 155 articles, so it's not a lot of content. I did end up getting it to pull in the categories using another web browser. I found another solution that allowed me to embed the "Print to PDF" button inside of the knowledge base in the help center though, that seemed to work more effectively.

I used Knowledge Print PDF Download Controls from the Marketplace. It generates a block of Code to place into your help center which adds a button to download the knowledge base document to a PDF or download the full section to PDF.